ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND NAMED DENIAL: CRITICS, “HOP-FROG,” AND
POE

Ruth Clements

Many critics conclude that Poe was not an alcoholic, and I wish to address this subject. We know enough of the disease
of alcoholism today to realize that denial is one of its chief manifestations, not only the denial of the alcoholic himself, but of his
family, a dysfunction known as “Affected Family Member Syndrome.” In short, the whole family conspires to pretend that there
is not an elephant in the living room. There are Poe scholars who suffer from this syndrome. Their adamant defense of Poe seems to me a
case of protesting too much. For there IS an elephant in the living room. And it behooves us to study it, as I have undertaken to do in
a longer work in progress. Our understanding of alcoholism furthers our understanding of Poe’s psychology, which, in turn,
provides us with a more powerful and penetrating vision into his works and, I believe, with a quickened appreciation of his talent.

Now I want to declare at the outset that I do not maintain that Poe or his work can be reduced to or be entirely
explained by his alcoholism. However, as Freud insisted in his preface to Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Poe,
“Investigations such as this do not claim to explain creative genius, but they do reveal the factors which awake it and the sort
of subject matter it is destined to choose.” Benjamin Fisher and Burton Pollin have suggested additional possibilities for
Poe’s references to alcohol, and these interpretations must be taken into account.(1) I
consider my approach as an aid, an excavator’s tool, to deepen our understanding of Poe’s life and work. Poe’s genius
cannot be explained by his alcoholism; but his alcoholism is inextricably linked to his life, to his fiction, and to his critical
theories.

Critics who deny Poe’s alcoholism may be inadvertently harking back to the bad old days when alcoholism was
considered, not as a disease like diabetes or any other, but as some kind of moral failing or character flaw. In the 1990 edition of
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, William Goldhurst writes that “It is a temptation to think of him as a
lunatic, a drug addict, an alcoholic, and if not an actual murderer, a morose and morbid individual who spent much time contemplating
violent deeds against the unsuspecting.”(2) To link the term “alcoholic” in a
series with “lunatic” and “murderer,” is, [page 146:]
intentionally or not, to do terrible mischief. We have come a long way in our study of this disease, but — as Goldhurst’s
passage makes painfully evident — a stubborn prejudice still exists.

Even so able a critic as Edward Davidson, in a 1956 introduction to a Poe anthology, writes: “One would like, for
all time, to destroy the fiction that Poe was a drunkard (he could not drink: owing to a curious but well-known nervous sensibility, one
drink of wine or whiskey made him virtually senseless).” But this comment describes the nature of Poe’s alcoholism.
Poe had the same severe allergy to alcohol that F. Scott Fitzgerald did: a single glass could completely alter their behavior. Yet this
never stopped either one of them from having that single glass time and time again.) ) Alcoholics are not so much defined by how much or
how often they drink, as by their reaction to the allergen. Davidson also writes that “If sometimes there should be a connection
between ‘life’ and ‘literature,’ it is virtually nonexistent in the case of Edgar Poe. Perhaps one might lay
down the truism that Poe wrote what he did because it was as remote as possible from his own experience.”(3) Davidson, it seems to me, is mistaken. Indeed, the connection between Poe’s life and literature is intense
and intimate, and alcoholism is a major link in the connecting chain.

Although Poe could not stop drinking, he did have that detached view of himself that allowed him to observe, with
clinical scrutiny, his own degeneration. While it is true that Poe made the detailed observation of sensations (also called
“bizarreries” or “intensities”) the object of parody in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” it is
also legitimate to suggest that he himself had a morbid fascination with, and a scientific curiosity over, the progression of his
disease, and that he used this doubled-self-observation to great effect in his fiction. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that it is this
doubled quality which keeps us so fascinated by Poe: We ourselves are drawn into a kind of acknowledgement of our own perversity as we
watch, spellbound, Poe watch himself fall apart. Similarly we watch a scientist watch himself fall literally to pieces in
Cronenberg’s psychologically stunning and darkly funny re-make of The Fly. In both cases, we are thrust into the
disquieting role of witnesses to the spectacle of a rationality keenly observing — and minutely recording, detailing! — its
losing battle to irrationality. O hail the conquering worm (or fly)! This jarring blend of pseudo-science and slapstick horror at once
makes us cringe and laugh — and play witness to our own doubled nature. I call this the Shlock of Recognition. The dramatic pull
of the morbidly fascinating [page 147:] together with his rational delight at being
able to record “scientifically,” in precise detail, the onslaught of chaos and destruction, is one of the major dynamics of
his life and work — the fall of the house of Poe.

Another new form of critical denial — swathed in medical garb — is the recent assertions that Poe was not
an alcoholic, but that he had an undiagnosed and ultimately fatal sugar irregularity. That Poe might have had some trouble metabolizing
sugar is possible; but this “twinkie defense” does not explain his compulsion to drink. Poe’s own letters and letters
from concerned friends bear ample witness to his alcoholism. For example, in 1835 Thomas W. White, publisher of the Southern Literary
Messenger, wrote to Poe: “That you are sincere in all your promises, I firmly believe. But, Edgar, when you once again tread
these streets, I have my fears that your resolves would fall through, — and that you would again sip the juice, even till it stole
away your senses. . ..Separate yourself from the bottle, and bottle-companions, for ever!. . .No man is safe who
drinks before breakfast! No man can do so, and attend to business properly. . ..”(4)

Poe was an alcoholic, and the better we understand the nature of the disease, the better we understand Poe. His seeming
“defenders” are defending nothing but a completely wrong-headed and out-dated view of alcoholism. When I speak of
Poe’s being an alcoholic, it is a description, not an indictment. Poe was not uniquely or unusually weak or flawed or
immoral. He was capable of handling the very real problems and sufferings in his private life as well as those associated with being a
“poet-aristocrat” in a Jacksonian democracy. Poe could handle these problems; he was both creative and courageous. It was
alcohol — and alcohol alone — that Poe could not handle. And that undid him.

Space does not allow me to detail the many ways in which Poe’s alcoholism is inextricably linked to his life, to
his fiction, and to his critical theories. In a longer work, I take advantage of the immense recent outpouring of medical/psychological
literature devoted to the disease of alcoholism, including the publications of Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as of pioneering historical
and literary studies, in order to examine Poe’s life and a number of his works in light of this modern research.(5) Here I focus on one story only, his last — “Hop-Frog.” Written eight months before Poe’s
death, tells the tale of a crippled dwarf, a court jester, who is in love with Trippetta, a pretty girl dwarf. They amuse the fat king,
a petty tyrant, who lives solely to [page 148:] be entertained. For a masquerade
ball, the king demands that Hop-Frog produce an idea for how he and his ministers should dress. The king, knowing that Hop-Frog is
afraid of wine, commands the dwarf-jester to drink. Trippetta comes to Hop-Frog’s aid, thus enraging the king, and he throws wine
in her face. Outraged, Hop-Frog then plots revenge. When the story ends, the king and his ministers, dressed as orangutans, and chained
to one another, are hoisted by a chandelier and burnt to a crisp. Hop-Frog and Trippetta are avenged, and they escape together through
the skylight.

Now, interpretations of this story range from the political to the psychoanalytical to the allegorical to the
socio-historical. Baudelaire, as was his wont, pictured “Poe living in a vast cage of mediocrity, a Hop-Frog who amused his
sovereign, the mob, while taking vengeance upon it.”) Marie Bonaparte viewed “Hop-Frog” as a typical tale of Oedipal
revenge. Others have seen it as a grotesque and cruel tale of non-Oedipal revenge. Still others have interpreted it as a powerful
allegory: the king representing Reality, the eternal antagonist of the creative mind, and the jester representing Imagination, the
creative artist who is maimed and imprisoned by the unthinking majority. A new and most original interpretation is Ronald
Gottesman’s view that “Hop-Frog” is a working out of Poe’s ambivalent responses to slavery.(5) As always with Poe, the story is capable of interpretation on different levels. What interests me here, however,
is the alcohol angle.

The autobiographical connection is clear: Poe’s severe allergic reaction to even a single glass of wine is made
manifest in the dwarf Hop-Frog. Wine, Poe tells us, “excites the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness,” he informs us
dryly, “is no comfortable feeling.” After one glass, Hop-Frog is described in these terms (M 3:1348): “Poor
fellow, his large eyes gleamed, rather than shone; for the effect of wine on his excitable brain was not more powerful than
instantaneous. He placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the company with a half-insane stare.”

In addition, Poe’s identification with “Hop-Frog” — the ultimate “outsider” —
is indicative of Poe’s own sense of himself as an alienated being, an intense existential observer of himself and others. This
sense of unbelonging, of not being able to fit in, is a dominant trait of alcoholics. Alcoholics Anonymous tells us: “Even before
our drinking got bad and people began to cut us off, nearly all of us suffered the feeling that we didn’t quite belong.” Poe
had always felt that way. As he wrote in an early poem: “From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were — I
have not seen / [page 149:] As others saw — I could not bring / My passions
from a common spring.”(6) The Byronic pose here is obvious. Nevertheless, I would venture to
say that the Byronic pose and alcoholism make a perfect co-dependent couple. Witness Byron himself, or London, or Hemingway.

Significantly, Poe tells us that the “king loved his practical jokes, and took pleasure in forcing Hop-Frog to
drink.” Now, this is an interesting turnabout. In Poe’s other tales, such as “The Black Cat,” the narrator
readily admits that he chooses to keep drinking, thus bringing upon himself the devastating consequences. “For what disease
is like Alcohol!,” cries the narrator of “The Black Cat,” who, after butchering his cat and sleeping off “the
fumes of the night’s debauch,” then, even when reason is restored, again drowns himself in wine. No one is forcing him to
drink; he is driven by an inner craving or compulsion — that is, by the disease itself, of which he is aware, to which he admits,
and which he calls by name.

Not so in “Hop-Frog.” And I believe that this passage reveals the tragic truth that Poe, at the very last,
assumed no responsibility. Poe was forever riding on what recovery specialists call “the merry-go-round named denial.”
Although Poe, the alcoholic, could never admit that it was drink that led to the insanity, his fictional characters (before Hop-Frog)
readily admit and reveal the truth. It is the nature of truth that it “will out”: magna est veritas, et praevalet. As
a person, Poe’s intense denial kept a lid on the truth; as an artist, though, he wove that truth into the very fabric of his art.

Poe’s deceiving and self-deceiving fantasies included the self-pitying and grandiose delusion that it was always
others who were to blame, who forced him to drink against his will. When a doctor warned Poe that another binge would be fatal, the
reply was that “if people would not tempt him, he would not fall” (A.H. Quinn 624). As A.A. ‘s put it, “Our
present anxieties and troubles, we cry, are caused by the behavior of other people.. . .We firmly believe that if only
they’d treat us better, we’d be all right. Therefore we think our indignation is justified and reasonable — that our
resentments are the ‘right kind.’ We aren’t the guilty ones. They are” (45-46)! Poe’s
penchant for deceiving others and himself into believing that he was not to blame for his drinking is transferred to the story wherein
the tyrant forces the subject (“poor fellow”) to drink. Thus we have Poe’s sense of himself as a powerless, passive
victim of others — their buffoon. [page 150:]

But let us take a closer look at how the king “forces” his subject to drink. He does not shove it down his
throat. “‘Come here, Hop-Frog,’ said he, as the jester and his friend entered the room: ‘swallow this bumper to
the health of your absent friends (here Hop-Frog sighed,) and then let us have the benefit of your invention. . .. Come,
drink! the wine will brighten your wits.’ (M 3: 1347-48)

“Hop-Frog endeavored, as usual, to get up a jest in reply to these advances from the king; but the effort was too
much. It happened to be the poor dwarf’s birthday, and the command to drink to his ‘absent friends’ forced the tears
to his eyes. Many large, bitter drops fell into the goblet as he took it, humbly, from the hand of the tyrant.” (M 3:
1347-48)

This is psychologically intriguing and complicated — alcoholic thinking at its “best”: cunning,
baffling, powerful! Hop-Frog takes the drink, knowing full well what it will do to him, because he feels helpless, impotent, in the face
of his own powerful emotions; he takes the goblet “humbly.” The memory of absent friends is enough to make him cry and seek
solace in wine; he “reluctantly drained the beaker,” a most curious and telling phrase. Here we can clearly discern the
biggest excuse that Poe used for his own drinking — the painful memory of a lost loved one. Indeed, in numerous letters, Poe
attributes his drinking to the death of his wife, Virginia. And many critics, unfamiliar with the characteristics of alcoholics, accept
this justification at face-value. For example, even one of Poe’s best biographers, Arthur Hobson Quinn, writes, “If ever
drinking were excusable, it was certainly in this desperate effort to forget” (A.H. Quinn 347-348).) ) This comment is seductive,
but it won’t do. The sober truth is that Poe drank not because of the death of a beautiful woman (whether wife, mother, or ideal),
but because he was an alcoholic. Listen to Alcoholics Anonymous: “The majority of A. A. members have suffered severely from
self-justification during their drinking days. For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses; excuses, of course, for
drinking, and for all kinds of crazy and damaging conduct. We had made the invention of alibis a fine art” (46-47). When Mrs.
Clemm would scold Poe for coming home drunk, he “excused himself by saying that he had met with some friends, who had persuaded
him to take dinner with them at a tavern” (Log, 125). Well, whether it was friends who persuaded him, or a king, the truth
is that it is never difficult to pull a rubber arm. We must keep that in mind when we read Quinn’s analysis of
“Hop-Frog.” He writes, “Perhaps Poe’s own reaction to those who urged him, [page 151:] against his will, to drink the one glass that took away his self-control, was the model for the
behavior of the dwarf” (A.H. Quinn 595). The phrase “against his will” is the tip-off. Recovering alcoholics
laughingly acknowledge their past reliance on “the-devil-made-me-do-it” excuse. They either blame the other, or blame
nothing at all: It wasn’t my idea to drink, they’ll say; or, it just happened — an accident; or (my
favorite), “I was struck drunk.”

Poe, like Hop-Frog, viewed himself as a victim. But also like Hop-Frog, Poe had creative cunning — his only power
tool. Hop-Frog wields this weapon to destroy the monster who “forced” him to drink. He is aided by Trippetta (girlfriend,
“mother,” ideal double), and together they rise, literally, above the tyrant (the king of the story, but also the tyrant
Alcohol to whom Hop-Frog, like Poe, is really enslaved) and escape his (its) clutches. Through cunning and love, then, Hop-Frog can
escape his addiction. He torches the alcohol; it will burn him no more. Thus Hop-Frog (and Poe) has his revenge against the slings and
arrows of life and against those who “forced” him to drink.

Poe was familiar with the images of perversity and terror used by temperance reformers in their speeches and
pamphlets.(7) The vivid and compelling picture of a “slave” caught in the clutches of
the “tyrant” Alcohol was a common one.(8) “Hop-Frog” is a dark-temperance
tale and, at the same time, an anti-temperance tale; for I believe that Poe was furiously (although unconsciously) undermining the moral
purpose of temperance literature: the individual’s acceptance of his alcoholism and the responsibilities that come with it. In
“Hop-Frog,” just as in Poe’s letters, blame is placed upon circumstance and upon the other, never upon the self: If
people would not tempt me, I would not fall. If Virginia hadn’t died, I would not drink. If the king were dead, I would be free.
And so on. A.A.’s call this the “if, then” myth which is, of course, a mainstay of the deadly denial game. Blaming the
other person (or circumstance) while seeing oneself as the victim, is a typical characteristic of alcoholics; and this trait was a
constant with Poe. In “Hop-Frog” there is no sense of responsibility; there is, instead, intense denial and a burning desire
to escape responsibility sense, he never matured. A problem common to alcoholics is an emotional inability to grow up, to remain a
virtual prisoner of childhood.. It is therefore not surprising that shortly after this story was written, Poe broke his temperance
pledge and went on another — and this time, final — binge. Poe never matured to full self-realization about his alcoholism,
and [page 152:] thus, in a sense, he never matured. A problem common to alcoholics
is an emotional inability to grow up, to remain a virtual prisoner of childhood.

“Hop-Frog” is an alcoholic’s wet dream, an adolescent’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which the
hero-victim, by virtue of his cleverness and by the love and loyalty of a sainted maiden, triumphs over adversity. Alcoholics are
forever thinking that their cunning will get them out of their mess, which is why recovering alcoholics call it
“stinking-thinking.” They use their creative intelligence to rationalize their drinking and to escape reality. Alcoholics
are also especially prone to the delusion that they can be “saved” by a partner who really understands them and loves
them. In reality, the partners they attract are most likely to be alcoholics themselves or emotionally under-developed co-dependents.
There is an intriguing correspondence between Trippetta, Virginia (Poe’s wife), and Rosalie (Poe’s sister) — none of
whom were grown-ups.

Many alcoholics, having missed out on a normal childhood due to their dysfunctional families, continue to yearn, well
into their adult years, for a “real” family that can provide them with the love and security they missed. They wear a big
heart-shaped button on their sleeves: Adopt Me. Alcoholics’ quest for emotional security consistently throws them into unworkable
relations with others. Acting like infants, they demand that people protect and take care of them. When their desperate needs are not
met (and how can they be, except in fiction?), alcoholics feel betrayed, abandoned. Poe, the quintessential orphan, turned Woman into
Protective Mother; he did the same with the universe, as his cosmology in Eureka indicates. He wanted to be protected, loved,
and, further, to be sucked back into the good night. There he would achieve a oneness that he craved. Hop-Frog and Trippetta achieve
this oneness, not through sexual consummation (for the dwarf is probably impotent: he suffers from a “deficiency in the lower
limbs” and “had it not in his power to render Trippetta many services”), but through an ideal consummation:
“Together, they effected their escape to their own country: for neither was seen again” (M 3: 238, 239, 246). This
country is, of course, “Fairy-Land” or that “distant Aidenn” in “The Raven.”

The tragedy of alcoholism is the tragedy of “Hop-Frog”; one cannot escape the disease (the tyrant) by
killing it or by physically removing oneself from it (“doing a geographic” as A.A.’s call it). The truth is, Hop-Frog
takes his disease with him when he exits through the [page 153:] skylight, just as
Poe took his along when he was doing all his geographics. Hop-Frog has not risen above anything, has escaped nothing. There is no
escape. As recovering alcoholics say, “the only way out is through,” meaning that one has to face the disease squarely and
deal with it honestly.

“Hop-Frog” is a demonstration of Poe’s alcoholic “stinking-thinking”: his blaming others
for his addiction, and his unwillingness to admit that he was on that futile and fatal “merry-go-round named denial.”
“Hop-Frog” is a fantastical tale that bears witness to Poe’s life-long craving to escape what he perceived as the
horror of reality. “Hop-Frog” is every alcoholic’s fairy tale.

NOTES

1. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-analytic
Interpretation (New York, 1971). See Fisher, The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol and Acoholism in the
Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Baltimore, 1978); Burton R. Pollin, “The Temperance Movement and Its Friends Look at Poe,”
Costerus 2 (1972) 119-144.

3. Edward H. Davidson, ed., Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1956),
viii, vii.See Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the Amercan Writer (New York, 1989). Donald W. Goodwin, in Alcohol and
the Writer (New York, 1988) argues, however, that “Poe, in his desperate effort to keep jobs, no doubt minimized his
drinking, as do most alcoholics, and likely encouraged the myth that he was supersensitive to small amounts of alcohol” (26). The truth is, the point at which alcoholics “cross the invisible line” (as
A.A.’s put it) is not fixed, but variable, depending upon the body’s chemistry and the drinking pattern. Sometimes they get
drunk on one glass, and sometimes it takes a bottle.

4. Sugar irregularity may play a chemical role in alcoholism, but this needs further
study. Possibly Poe, through his father David, was genetically predisposed to the disease and that his brother Henry and his sister
Rosalie were also affected. Poe may have suffered from other organic diseases, or may have had a brain lesion, but this does not negate
his alcoholism. White’s comment is quoted in Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan
Poe, 1809-1849 (Boston, 1987) 172. [page 154:]

7. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination
in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) pp. 66-73.

8. Some pamphlets argued that the Revolution’s success in ending British rule would
be a hollow victory indeed if Americans became enslaved to alcohol; America was no place for the bondage of men either to other men or
to liquor. “Here for the first time we see liberty viewed in a new light, not as a man’s freedom to drink unlimited
quantities of alcohol but as a man’s freedom to be his own master, with the attendant responsibility to exercise self-control,
moderation, and reason” (Rorabaugh, 37). See also Abraham Lincoln’s Address to the Washington Temperance Society of
Springfield, Illinois, 22 February 1842 for slavery imagery: “But when one, who has long been known as a victim of intemperance,
bursts the fetters that have bound him.. . .” and “Turn now, to the temperance revolution. In it, we shall
find a stronger bondage broken; a viler slavery, manumitted; a greater tyrant deposed.” [from “The Sorrow Quenching Draughts
of Liberty,” Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer, eds. Lincoln on Democracy (New York, 1990) pp. 28-30]. The tyrant-slave
image is still with us today. A.A. describes alcoholism as “a tyrant wielding a double-edged sword: an allergy of the body coupled
with an obsession of the mind” (Alcoholics Anonymous 22).